No. 4 Seminoles ready to start postseason

Florida State enters ACC tournament as top seed after winning regular season title

Apr. 30, 2014

Florida State has been one of the more dominant teams in the country this season, thanks to contributions from Lauren Harris, Maddie O’Brien and the snazzy tunes of Seminole Sound. / Ondrej Pazdirek/FSView

Written by

Drew MacFarlane

Staff Writer @DrewMacFarlane

The start of the postseason is here and for Florida State it brings another accomplishment to an already killer season.

At the beginning of the ACC Tournament, Florida State will begin play as not only the No. 1 seed in the conference tournament, but also the No. 4 team in the nation, according to the polls submitted by ESPN, USA Softball and the NFCA. For the ’Noles, this is their highest ranking in 10 years, which has to be a huge emotional boost going into the most important part of the season.

To start their road to their 12th ACC Championship, Florida State will meet a strangely familiar opponent in College Park, Maryland. Just after wrapping up a season finale series sweep of Georgia Tech, FSU will meet the Yellow Jackets in the first round of the tournament as a No. 1-No. 8 seed matchup.

It almost looks coincidental at first sight when you see how the ACC Tournament is seeded and which teams made the cut. Strangely enough, following Georgia Tech at the No. 8 seed, there’s a significant drop off in teams competing for that final spot.

Georgia Tech’s 11 conference wins almost double the next closest, Pitt, who has only six. Unfortunately for the Panthers and fellow bottom dwellers, Maryland and Virginia, the top-eight teams that received a seed look like they’re in a higher tier.

So bring on GT, a team that managed to scrape up only a single run against Florida State last week. For the ’Noles, the game plan needs to be that typical cliché that nobody enjoys hearing and that’s simply playing their game. Florida State has proven themselves as the best team in the conference during the regular season, owning the ACC with a 24-3 record, so they need to continue on and show that.

Florida State closed out the Yellow Jackets to end the regular season, outscoring them 12-1, so the question isn’t who the better team is, rather who’s going to bring it during the game it truly counts.

As it has been all season long, pitching will have to be key. Lacey Waldrop and Jessica Burroughs have had the answers this season and it’ll be expected during the postseason. Both are one and two in the conference with the lowest ERAs in the ACC and Waldrop has four more wins than the next closest pitcher. The saying “Defense wins championships” has been proven to be true and pitching the main source of keeping teams off the board.

That being said, Florida State will still need their offense to be cranking. Maddie O’Brien and Courtney Senas have been leading the way, topping the ACC with a combined 120 RBIs between the two of them, however, they’ve been receiving some back up as of late. Victoria East and Bailey Schinella have been heating up and depth scoring will be needed if the biggest bats run dry.

Florida State knows they’ve killed it this year, but they also know it’s far from over and they’ve come nowhere close to achieving their final goal.

In her blog on Seminoles.com, “Maddie’s Minutes”, O’Brien states “At the beginning of the season we set many goals in hopes that if we accomplished each we would be in a good spot for postseason, and there is no doubt in any of our minds that we have done that. With that being said, we all know that this is not where we stop. As a team, we will continue to make each other better, put in the work, and play for the ones who can’t.”

This is a journey within the journey, with the end being a run for a College World Series, and that road starts now.